Authors: Indrapramit Das

Breaking Water (4 page)

“You can give her to the hospitals, the research institutes, if you want to keep her from the police,” I said. “They can put her in cold storage.”

He shook his head. “No, Miss Sen. Maybe if she was younger. The dead have short lives. This I know now. She would suffer a lot if they tried to freeze her now.” He had decided. Perhaps because of his meeting with the mother. Perhaps not.

He used her rope leash to lead her from the altar to a hired lorry. By now, she was barely able to walk, waddling slowly and leaving a trail of dark brown droplets that her garlands dragged into smears. Men with mops swept the trail away as she was led across the courtyard. The walk took half an hour. The guru draped a cloth over her face so all the people they passed didn't panic her. Dragging her flower garlands, she was lifted into the back of the lorry in a large blanket, five sweating men heaving at its sides and rolling her in with no dignity. I followed the lorry to the Garia crematorium.

I waited in the crematorium's cold, shadowy halls as the guru's wife was taken in for incineration.

The worst thing I have ever heard in my life was the brief scream that rang out through the crematorium, sharp and human, before being lost in the hum of the ovens. I went outside to find a dog barking furiously in the courtyard, drool flying into the dirt. I leaned against the yellow walls of the building and waited.

The guru emerged and thanked me again.

“That screamâwas that her?” I asked.

He nodded. “It's good. It's good that her mother wasn't here.” I saw his hands shaking like the mother's had.

“What'll you do now?” I asked.

“I'll find more of the dead who need my help. Other people want to give me their dead, to take care of, to speak to in my visions. I have followers. I'll never let one of the dead down like this again. One day, Miss Sen, I'll be a big guru, like the ones you see on TV, in the newspapers. I'll have money. When I do, I'll buy one of those resorts, those hotels in the mountains, high up. In the Himalayas or”âhe paused, then spoke carefullyâ“Switzerland. I saw them in magazines. It's always cold, and they're huge. There, my dead can roam free, and live longer. You watch; you'll see. Away from all these people trying to take them, away from police. They'll be happy there.”

I wished him luck as he walked back to his followers, looking strange without his wife by his side. In my car, I cried quietly for that walking corpse, as if I were crying for the woman who had died in its body.

*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *

Guru Yama doesn't yet have a Swiss ski resort for his dead. He does have an ashram in Uluberia, with refrigerated chambers for his “children” (no more wives or husbands, to reduce the accusations of necrophilia). He keeps himself in a perpetual state of fever, allowing his children to bite him every month, staving off death and resurrection via antibiotics paid for by his followers and clients. Detractors of dead-charmers say that the visions and dreams through which they talk to the dead are nothing but delirium brought about by fever and drugs, including heroin and hash taken for the pain. I plan, one day soon, to do a book of photo essays with my friend Saptarshi about him and his flocks, dead and alive.

I still don't know whether he's a charlatan, or deluded, or a prophet.

Perhaps because I'm an atheist, I've never trusted charismatic religious figures who use their influence to gather wealth. I don't quite recognize the man I see in videos and pictures now, covered in ash, turmeric paste and bandages, cloaked in hash and incense smoke, beard hanging down to his hollow stomach, surrounded by veiled corpses like a true lord of death. But I remember the man who walked out of Garia crematorium, his shaking hands, his shocked stare. His grief for the creature he called his wife was so very real. We both heard her scream as she died a second time.

The thing about the reality of the undead is that we can now see the afterlife. We live in it. And we share that afterlife with its dead inhabitants, who walk among us. But we can't talk to them, and they can't talk to us. That truly is the most exquisite, atheistic hell.

5. Notes on Afterlife

Visiting my parents is different now. Now, when I drink tea with them on their veranda, tea that somehow tastes of my childhood even though it's just plain old Darjeeling, I watch them age gently next to me. More than ever, every new wrinkle, every new wince of bodily pain, every glimmer of sun off a newly silvered strand of hair catches my eye. And I can't help but think of the future.

In this, should I say, apocalyptic future, I have to sign a form by their deathbeds. The form asks if their death is to be final, if I want to authorize doctors to sever their brain stems and puncture each lobe right after their hearts stop beating, to make sure they won't rise up again in undeath. There are two other options: I can illegally have them bitten by a corpse belonging to a dead-charmer before they die, to increase their chances of resurrection. Or I can take a cosmic gamble and let the universe decide between two terrible things by checking the other box on the form that says my parents should be left untouched after death, to see if their bodies naturally choose undeath. The undead will not be allowed in homes because of numerous health hazards including dangerous, often lethal, bites. So if my parents rise into undeath it will fall to me to hand them over to the government or a private scientific institution, or a dead-charmer.

This
is
the future. Governments are already trying to figure out appropriate legislation for the realities of dead people waking up and creating an entirely new kind of life.

I think about simply losing my parents forever, once the only choice. Then I think of them undead. And I think of Guru Yama's wife, grotesque and alien, death itself personified as a gigantic, corpulent infant, crooning to itself and eating a single marigold as I struggled to understand whether its painfully corrupted form caused it pain. I think of it screaming in an oven.

I see myself, pen hovering over the forms, not knowing which box to check.

Who am I to deny someone I love a second life, however incomprehensible, however different from the first? And then, with both relief and panic, I realize it's not even my choice, but my parents'. One day, I'll have to have a conversation with them about whether or not they want to risk becoming a fucking zombie. I haven't asked yet.

And one day, when I have a childâif I have a childâI'll have to have that conversation again, when they ask me.

When these thoughts creep into those evening conversations with my parents, tinting them with dread, I think of two corpses shambling up a snow-clad mountain in Switzerland, their flesh preserved in a fur of frost that glitters under a high, clear sun, their thoughts unfathomable.

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